Are You One of the Twenty-Three Million Fewer NFL Playoff Viewers?

Not only has the NFL seen a massive loss of TV viewership over the regular season, but it has suffered 23 million fewer viewers for this year’s playoffs. If you are on of those millions, a new report, according to Breitbart, stated that others joined you in walking away from this year’s playoff games due to the player protests against the country during the playing of the national anthem. Did the players win their point or did the NFL viewers decide the National Anthem over player anarchy?

It seems that the NFL players decided to abandon the real employers who pay their multi-million-dollar salaries for a largely undefined cause that should never have been raised on the football field. These overpaid moral warriors, without a true defined cause, have exposed a truth most viewers of the game arrived at. “We don’t need to watch you take a knee against our nation, while our brave military is sacrificing life and limb by standing up for America!”

The proof is in the numbers.

Clay Travis of Outkick the Coverage examined the TV ratings for every game in the first round of the NFL playoffs. He discovered that each game was down by millions of viewers and ratings fell to a ten-year low. The numbers become even more disturbing if you are a NFL owner. The report also showed viewership hit a ten-year low for the playoffs and teams suffered a ten percent loss of viewers over the 2016 season.

The bottom line is dramatically clear. Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the national anthem when he played for the 49ers, began a national protest that was nebulous in design and aimless in execution. Now the free agent, who was on Time‘s 2017 Person of the Year shortlist, has harmed the game and cost communities where teams are located millions of dollars. And for what?

He and the hundreds of players that, at one point during the NFL season, took a knee against the National Anthem, couldn’t articulate one specific infraction against the black or minority communities that this protest would eliminate. In fact, many of these players would never take a knee in a southside Chicago neighborhood against black-on-black gang violence and murder of black children.

Of course, they would not because their cause and their claims ring hollow. If there is injustice at play in the urban communities of America, where are their voices and their money as well as their involvement? Where is their stinging criticism over the educational plantations that hold black youth prisoners, in a system run by black teachers, liberal administrators and black superintendents?

They are super rich hypocrites who love to be seen smashing heads on the gridiron while taking a knee on the sidelines. But, for the young black or minority youth that they claim to be protesting for, they are no shows. “Black Lives Matter” on the beneficiaries of Kaepernick’s million-dollar donation scheme, has been equally absent in the black and minority neighborhoods to protest against black murders by blacks and educational imprisonment.

Remember, this is only a game which is simply a pastime that viewers can relax in front of their television set and enjoy with family and friends. So, these self-indulgent quasi-NFL moralists bet wrong. They were wrong when they gambled that a made-up protest by a sidelined quarterback was vital enough to shove down the throats of viewers.

Nielsen Data Media Research released an analysis of the viewership and the data concluded that that viewership among white people spiraled downward in every single demographic. In addition, viewership was also reduced among adults of every single ethnicity and gender. So, the protests against the National Anthem backfired.

All of the plummeting numbers may be pale in comparison to what the Super Bowl viewership may fall victim to. So, if players on the playoff and Super Bowl teams want to take a knee against the National Anthem, they will be doing it at their and the NFL’s peril.

Kevin Fobbs has more than 35 years of wide-ranging experience as a community and tenant organizer, Legal Services outreach program director, public relations consultant, business executive, gubernatorial and presidential appointee, political advisor, widely published writer, and national lecturer. Kevin is co-chair and co-founder of AC-3 (American-Canadian Conservative Coalition) that focuses on issues on both sides of the border between the two countries.

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